1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a personal catalog and knowledge management system, method and article of manufacture and, more particularly, relates to a personal catalog and knowledge management system, method and article of manufacture which make use of a computer to assist a user in managing massive information.
2. Description of Prior Art
As Internet rises and World Wide Web develops, the Internet prevails all over the world. Not only persons on the Internet double in number but also hundreds of million of registered web sites come to a historic high. This revolutionary web tide accelerates the wheel of knowledge economics era. Almost all of the culture and knowledge of humankind have become deliverable information being widely distributed and readily accessible on the Internet.
However, the widely distributed massive information brings about information anxiety. The main reason lies in that the information is merely a stack of characters or even digital bytes and does not exactly become one""s knowledge, if it is not properly arranged, classified and digested by the receiver. Also, there always exist regrets for being incapable of effectively collecting, classifying, and adding value to information so as to form personal knowledge and make further knowledge management after browsing that mass of information. Consequently, although being aware of that knowledge is power and reaching valuable information, most people can not efficiently utilize the information and perform knowledge management.
From the viewpoint of knowledge management, information should be value added, such as being arranged, classified and commented on, in order to transfer the same to become one""s useful knowledge and to make further knowledge management. In other words, the objective of knowledge management is to take apart original structure of information and to combine the same with people""s intrinsic concepts. And in the end, the information will become real xe2x80x9cknowledgexe2x80x9d by inspecting the information from various angles based on the intrinsic concepts.
Conventional techniques, however, do not provide sufficient and handy functions of information collection, arrangement and commentary for personal knowledge formation and management, no matter during browsing information on a network via a browser, retrieving information on various databases or from various document files.
Take the functions xe2x80x9cBookmarkxe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9cMy Favoritexe2x80x9d of browsers as example, although they may record a user""s favorite web sites for next visit, they are not specialized in collecting and putting comments on the contents of the web sites. Even if a user downloads information from the target web site to her/his computer via the browser, the user must either save the information in a file, or open an application such as Microsoft Word 2000 to paste previously selected and copied data therein. Consequently, not only the conventional techniques are unhandy in information collection and classification, but also do not provide facilitations in commentary, marking, arrangement, adding value, accessing, browsing and search of the collected information.
In light of the above, it is necessary to provide an effective solution aimed at solving the deficiency of the prior art for facilitating personal catalog and knowledge management.
For improvement, the present invention provides a system, method and article of manufacture for personal catalog and knowledge management. The main objective is to facilitate digital information collection, classification and commentary. The present invention allows to manage digital information in a way like clipping desirable or useful articles to a scrapbook for further classification and commentary after reading a newspaper or a book. Furthermore, the present invention makes use of digitized information for automatic data preservation, arrangement and search.
A major aspect of the present invention is to collect data including text and images from a visible data source providing information through a data collection module; to generate a classified catalog folder and to put the collected data in the folder for personal catalog management through a data classification module; to comment on and add value to the data through a data commentary module; and to access the collected data and related value-added contents in a storage device through a data access module.
Preferably, the visible data source is an application displaying the information on a display device for a user to browse and providing either a function of drag and drop or a function of copy and paste for another application to retrieve at least a portion of the information. That is, the present invention can be applied to collect information in an application which provides a function of drag and drop or a function of copy and paste and displays information for a user to browse. Particularly, the visible data source is a browser, a database or an opened document file.
Preferably, the data classification module provides the user to generate the classified catalog folder in a default or a user-defined way.
Preferably, the description field selectively further includes a data title field, a data subject field, a data category field, a data keyword field and a data comment field.
Preferably, the data commentary module of the present invention further provides a data origin field for recording origin of the data. The content of the data origin field is user-defined or automatically retrieved from origin data recited in the data source. The data commentary module further provides a data value-added editing function in facilitating editing and commenting on the data.
The present invention further includes a data search module for searching the data collected in the system according to a predetermined searching criterion.